Manohla Dargis

This film, which was never released in America and will now be making its way across the country in limited release, has been immaculately restored and features new subtitles. You can get lost in the blackness of its heart and its shadows. You might never come back.

If in Bresson's films nothing ever seems out of place or superfluous it's because he strove to find the essential truth of the image. Not an image or sound is wasted -- or offered up in self-glorification -- and from such seeming simplicity there arises a world of feeling.

It’s a pitiless, violent story that in its telling becomes a haunting and haunted intellectual and aesthetic achievement.

Bong’s command of the medium is thrilling. He likes to move the camera, sometimes just to nudge your attention from where you think it should be, but always in concert with his restlessly inventive staging.

Cuarón uses one household on one street to open up a world, working on a panoramic scale often reserved for war stories, but with the sensibility of a personal diarist. It’s an expansive, emotional portrait of life buffeted by violent forces, and a masterpiece.

The result is an American masterpiece, independent to the bone.

The genius of 12 Years a Slave is its insistence on banal evil, and on terror, that seeped into souls, bound bodies and reaped an enduring, terrible price.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is an exciting, goofy and deadly serious big-screen no — a no to complacency, to oppression, to tyranny. It’s a carnivalesque epic about good and evil, violence and power, inalienable rights and the fight against injustice; it’s also a love story.

When Mr. Eisenberg makes Mark's face go blank, the character seems scarily emptied out: it's a subtly great, at times unsettling, performance.

The movie is overflowing with ideas — about history, capitalism, cinema, representation — but it also tests your patience before amply rewarding it.

A masterpiece about life, death and everything in between.

Ms. Bigelow's direction here is unexpectedly stunning, at once bold and intimate: she has a genius for infusing even large-scale action set pieces with the human element.

The arc of the moral universe may bend toward justice. But as Collective lays out with anguished detail and a profound, moving sense of decency, it takes stubborn, angry people — journalists, politicians, artists, activists — to hammer at that arc until it starts bending, maybe, in the right direction.

Dunkirk is a tour de force of cinematic craft and technique, but one that is unambiguously in the service of a sober, sincere, profoundly moral story that closes the distance between yesterday’s fights and today’s.

Generous, soulful film.

Like the film itself, the performance (Giamatti's) is deeply controlled, played with restraint and with microscopic attention to detail.

The movie’s modesty — its intimacy, human scale, humble locations and lack of visual oomph — is one of its strengths.

Call Me by Your Name is less a coming-of-age story, a tale of innocence and loss, than one about coming into sensibility. In that way, it is about the creation of a new man who, the story suggests, is liberated by pleasure that doesn’t necessarily establish sexual identity.

Like the convictions of some born into religious families, his (Carlos) Marxism seems more a matter of habit than faith. What seems to turn him on is power, which, the movie suggests, he nurtured alongside his luxe tastes.

With delicacy, minimal dialogue and lucid, harmoniously balanced images, Sciamma (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) invites you into a world that is by turns ordinary and enigmatic.

One of the pleasures of Kapadia’s filmmaking is that she’s inviting you to discover her characters on their terms, which means embracing the inner and outer rhythms of their lives.

Some filmed stage shows die on the screen from a sheer lack of visual energy and invention. Lee, a master of the art, uses cinema’s plasticity to complement this production, making it come alive in two dimensions.

In the past, Kore-eda’s delicacy has at times enervated his movies. Here, though, the family’s toughness, thieving and secrets, its poverty and desperation, work like ballast on his sensibilities. In their grubby imperfections, Kore-eda finds a perfect story about being human.

Lots of stuff happens, lots and lots, and some of it can be hard to track. But the bedlam is intentional and amusing. All you need to do is latch onto Howard as he runs from here to there, yelling greetings, taking calls, making deals, always moving amid jump cuts, zooms and lurid close-ups.

As he (Wong Kar-wai) floods the screen with beauty and fills the soundtrack with hypnotic rhythms, he forges a filmmaking style of incomparable eroticism.

The film is above all a consummate work of art, one that transcends the historically fraught context of its making, and its pleasures are unapologetically aesthetic. It reveals, excites, disturbs, provokes, but the window it opens is to human consciousness itself.

Here Mr. Cantet -- whose earlier features include "Human Resources" and "Time Out," two other dramas about systems of power -- has done that rarest of things in movies about children: He has allowed them to talk.

I don’t think for a second that Joseph is interested in answering questions, one reason that “BLKNWS” can feel like an invitation. He wants to open your mind and maybe blow it (he succeeds on both counts) in a work that, among many other things, interrogates memory, history and the archive.